Cabe, Some of the stuff from that area was different. But just consider how it would gfeel if suddenly your phone conversation was being played outside, in real time, very loud, for ecveryone to hear. That w my concept, first invented to make drivers pay attention to driving instead of their phone calls. It no longer is a valid option se because cell conversations are digitized instead of analog, which they used to be.

Cabe, before jamming the other side's communication, be sure to check on the legality of it, since intentional jamming is often illegal. But you caertainly could have a receiver tuned to their communications channel and play it through a loud PA system. That would serve as both a great demoralizer and a means to make their com system useless. Although there may be a problem with some of the new laws relating to the privacy of communications. My take on that is that only an idiot or a fool would believe that radiom signals are only received by those that they are intendded for. The very basic rules of physics show otherwise.

You made me remember an important factor in war. The side with better communication will win.

Cyberwarefare is about taking out the opposition's communication, in some area or other.

Reminds me when I play paintball. My friends and I would just run out there, barely talking to one another. Like lone gunmen running around. We would all get shot at some point. We now use wireless headsets to stay in constant contact. We do way better in coordination and usually dominate the other side. Cyberwarefare would be knocking out our communications by hacking into our system (walkie talkie channel) and drowning us out.

This gave me a good idea about doing this to organized opposition. I would drown every channel in static. My friends and I would use a secure private connection. Hmmmm.....

I was not born at that time. I was never a tail gunner, but I worked at one place that had quite a few vetrans including a guy who had been a tail gunner. They did learn independance and fast reactions, and how to repair a gun in a real hurry. He did a bit of everything in that place. It is just an excellent example of developing a skill that most companies don't need.

What I can see now about the "hotter" incidences of cyberwarfare is that with the amount of computerized everything that we presently have, if the oppositions computers could be impaired then the advantage would be held, mostly because tactical communications are the tactical advantage, at least in most instances.

During somewhat more peaceful intervals, grabbing trade secrets is a cheap way to beat the competition. Development costs for many products are a big part of the product expense.

Ann, any time that jobs are taken away from anybody, for any reason, employees are hurt. Been there, done that, quite a few times. But every job offers the chance to learn new skills and become more valuable to the next employer. The one exception that I have heard of was the job of "tail-gunner" in the old Flying Fortress aircraft back in WW2. The only useful skill from that job was performing well under extreme pressure.

Jobs do become obsolete, and companies do close their doors. So it happens that jobs do go away and people are hurt to a greater or lesser extent. BHut that is how it works in this world, quite independant of any degree of exploitation.

I don't agree that all exploitation is not harmful. Those individual workers may not be harmed in the short-term. But in the long term, they will be hurt when the jobs are taken away. And in the short term, the higher-wage workers whose jobs are displaced in another country or a different area of the same country, are definitely hurt. History tells us that this scenario has been played out again and again around the world.

Cabe, you are correct, just because something is a large financial crime does not make it an act of war. But then we see the drug cartels waging war as part of their ongoing crime enterprise. But in that case all of those warlike activities are incidental to the primary criminal activity.

A war prosecuted in an attempt to be less than maximally evil is soldiers fighting soldiers, with the goal of subduing the opposing armed soldiers. A war intended to be maximally evil is soldiers killing and injuring the nonparticipating populations just for the sake of killing them. Examples would include the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and much more recently the bombing of the Boston Marathon crowd by those jihadist soldiers. A different technology but a similar level of cowardice.

Cyberwarfare, while certainly having the potential to be quite damaging is probably not as evil in most instances. The exceptions would be the "spoofing" of the commercial airliners navigation system to lead it into enemy airspace where it was shot down. That did happen just a few years ago.

Ann, consider the workers at the auto plants in Mexico City. I have seen them, and they were earning more than they could any place else around there. Also at the other plants in more rural areas, as well. Were they being exploited? Quite probably. But were they also living a lot better than they would be if they were not being so exploited? Definitely! And they were certainly not being hurt by that better income than they could get anyplace else.

My point being that not all exploitation is being harmful.

Of course there are also evil exploiters, which are much closer to the forced slave labor camps that we have heard about in the past.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

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